Bruno Fischer

by J. Max Gilbert

  Milton and his rifle were in the hall. He peered into the room and nodded. “Should I get Tilly?”

  “Yeah,” Rufus said.

  Milton moved toward the stairs. His rifle wasn’t necessary. Rufus’ automatic was enough. It looked like the one I had taken from Larry last night. There was irony in that for anybody who wanted it.

  “What’s that for?” I asked, nodding at the gun.

  “Step back a little, Bert. That’s the stuff — I don’t want1 you to hand me one of them socks of yours.” Rufus regarded me rather sadly. “Maybe he asked for it, fooling around with your missus. I figured you as a real guy, Bert. You burn somebody down in a fair fight, even the boss, that’s one thing. But a knife in the back!”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” I said.

  “I seen you go in the bathroom. A couple of minutes later I go in and find the boss knifed “

  ‘‘That’s the way I found him too. I came to tell Clara. I was going out to break the news to the rest of you when you barged in.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Molly said: “I think Tilly knifed him.” She had rolled one stocking all the way up and was holding the second in both hands. She was hardly the same woman she had been a minute ago. Looking at her now, I found it hard to think of her as having wept last night. Her control was back; she was tough-fibered and alert. “Tilly will be the boss now that George is dead,” she added and wiggled her bare toes.

  “That fat tub!” Uncertainty crossed Rufus’ face. He said thoughtfully: “She and the boss was always scrapping. She was always trying to tell him how to run things. Tilly has ambitions.”

  Molly and I were doing it again — the team of super-salesmen who could talk a gun out of man’s hand. We would play them against each other and all against Tilly, and we would come out of it the way we had before. My stomach fell back into place.

  They were coming up the stairs. Somebody raced ahead of the others, probably Beezie. The three of us in the bedroom listened to them move to the bathroom. What little conversation there was at the end of the hall was in inaudible mutters. The steps trickled toward us, Tilly appeared first, looking as grim as any executioner. She waddled past Rufus and leaned her massive hips against the dresser.

  “Why’d you kill him, Bert?” she demanded.

  “I think you did,” I said.

  Her chin jumped. She looked as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. Then an unfamiliar voice said: “What the hell’s Breen doing here?”

  The voice shouldn’t have been unfamiliar. I had heard it two days ago in the Planet showroom when I had returned from lunch. He stood in the doorway and peered at me over Beezie’s shoulder — the slim man with the too-tight clothes and the empty face, the man sent by Moon to warn me that my family would be harmed if I didn’t hand over the bag. Ed Weaver he had said his name was, and while I’d been in the bathroom I had heard him arrive and had heard Beezie greet him as Ed. By any name he spelled death.

  “What’s that?” Tilly bid. “Who’d you say he is?”

  “Adam Breen. What the hell’s he doing here?” '

  Voices exploded, but they did not belong to Molly or me. The super-salesmen had run out of the ultimate argument. I looked at her. Her head was bent far over as she pulled on her second stocking.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  They put us in a hole in the ground. It was somewhat roomier than a grave, but as dark and dank and airless and lonely.

  We were under the barn. The floor was hard dirt, the ceiling was the floor of the barn, the walls were jagged field stone. The wooden ladder by which we had descended had been drawn up and the trap door shut and locked. They had left us without food or water or light, without anything, to lie on or sit on, and with only the air which had come down with us through the trap door. Years ago this hole must have been. a storeroom. Now it was a dungeon to cause resistance to crumple and the mind to die.

  I stopped walking the six steps from wall to wall and stood watching the glow of Molly’s cigarette. She sat on the damp floor and nursed the last cigarette either of us had left. Her face leaped out of blackness when she drew on it— a ghost face flickering across my vision and vanishing. If not for that dot of light, I would have lost the feeling that she was here with me. She had no tears, no words, not even, I thought, fear. The darkness was a shell into which she had drawn herself.

  Two matches remained. I struck one and looked at my wristwatch. It was not possible that only four hours had passed since they had forced us to descend into this hole. I held the watch to my ear and in that silence the ticking was like a pounding heart.

  “Twenty after two,” I said. “Hungry?”

  Her voice was toneless. “No, but I’m terribly thirsty. At eleven last night I had my last drink, and it was beer.”

  “We won’t die of thirst,” I said. “We’ll suffocate first.”

  I found myself breathing with my mouth open. We had recklessly burned up much of our air with our cigarettes, but all the same I regretted that there were no more to smoke.

  The tip her cigarette brightened, and I could see the nails of her thumb and forefinger cling to the last half inch. She took a final drag and then tossed it to the ground. Wistfully I watched that feeble light struggle against the blackness and succumb.

  Overhead ancient hinges creaked.

  Slowly the trap door lifted, sending a growing layer of daylight down to us and a gush of breathable air. Rufus Lamb’s bald head and long jaw appeared inverted above us.

  “Had enough?” he asked.

  I gulped down dryness. “You’re not so smart, Rufus,” I said. “Tilly killed Moon. She wants to become the boss. If you’re in the way, she’ll kill you too.”

  “Never mind Tilly. All you got to worry about is giving me the bag.”

  “Are you going to let her get away with murdering your boss?”

  He grinned mirthlessly. “You’re a slick talker, you and the girl, but all the talk I want to hear from you is about the bag. You’re in a spot, Bert — I mean Breen. What good will the bag do you down there? Let’s have it and we’ll forget you knifed the boss.”

  “I told you Tilly did it”

  “You told me lots of things except what I want to know.”

  “I explained this morning that whoever killed Jasper Vital must have taken the bag.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” he said. “The boss had all the answers. One answer was that you’ve got the bag.”

  It was the same merry-go-round I had been on for days, and there was no way off. The back of my neck hurt from looking up. I removed my gaze from Rufus and put it on. Molly. She hadn’t moved. She sat with her back against the rough field stone and her knees drawn up to her chin. In the light her face was still a ghost face, as static as a portrait.

  I said to Rufus: “All right, let’s suppose I have the bag. But she can’t tell you anything about it. Why not let her go?”

  “Who is she?” he demanded. “She ain’t Clara Darby. She fooled me neat, but I know she ain’t Clara Darby.”

  Molly didn’t answer. This morning in our room she hadn’t answered that question either after Ed Weaver had exposed me. Woodenly she had said that it made no difference who she was. And it didn’t. Whoever she was, she was in this with me and would die with me.

  “I picked her up on the road,” I said. “I know nothing about her.”

  “Fooey! You signed the register husband and wife. You were both in the same room.”

  “Why not?” I said. “She’s pretty and didn’t object to spending a night with me. She never heard of the bag till she came here.”

  Rufus sighed. “You and her can both go if you stop being a dope. A smart guy makes a deal when he’s on a spot. Maybe there’ll even be a few grand in it for you.”

  “I haven’t got it.”

  He stood up. All I could see of him were his legs and I noticed for the first time that he was knock-kneed. That was a tremendously unimportant fact, like everything else now but how h
ard death would come. He said somewhat regretfully: “Looks like you need more time to think it over.” The trap door closed.

  I put my tired shoulders against the sweating wall. Across the blackness I heard Molly draw in her breath. That was all, that small sniffle which in any other woman might have been a prelude to tears. But she did not weep. Perhaps she had exhausted a very small capacity for tears last night.

  When she spoke, her voice was as lonely as the darkness. “They say dying of thirst is a horrible death. How long does it take?”

  “They’d kill us even if I had the bag to give them,” I said. “We’ve seen too much.”

  “But it would be a quick death.”

  A raw scream welled up in my parched throat. I choked it off. “You still don’t believe I haven’t got it. Nobody does. That’s why we’ve got to die.”

  I started to walk again — six steps, turn, six steps. The other direction, toward Molly’s wall, was seven steps, but I didn’t go that way.

  In the darkness something touched me. I stood very still. Her arm went around my waist. “Hold me, honey!” She said. “Don’t ever let me go!”

  I pulled her against me. My mouth groped for hers and found it seeking mine, and we were no longer alone in that sightless, tragic world of ours. After a while we sat on the ground on my jacket. My back was against the wall and her head on my shoulder. There was thirst and hunger and darkness and so little time left, but there was also the feel of her in my arms, and that was good. That was the only good left.

  Time had remained above ground with the sun and the stars. An hour or ten hours passed before either of us spoke. Then she said: “Adam?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you thinking about your wife?”

  “About Carol mostly. I’ve had years with Esther — not enough, but we’ve had lots of good times together. But Carol — she’s hot yet seven and I’ve known her only half her life. I’ve missed all those years when she was changing from an infant to a grown child. It’s hard to put into words. You’ve got to be a parent yourself to understand.”

  “I understand, honey.”

  “When I was in the army here, and then overseas, I wanted Esther all the time, but not as much as I wanted Carol. I don’t mean that I loved Esther less: It was different. I would return to Esther the way I’d left her. But Carol — “ I licked dry lips with a dry tongue. “The biggest thing in life is watching your children grow up. Maybe in this rotten world of ours it’s the only big thing there is.”

  “Poor Adam.” Her warm hand touched my cheek.

  “Damn it, don’t pity me!” I said. “I’ll only die and it will be over for me, but Carol won’t have a father and Esther a husband. They won’t even be able to put flowers on my grave because they’ll never know if I’m alive or dead.”

  My voice trailed off. I was no longer aware of her in my arms. I had left the hole for an ugly red-brick house in Brooklyn.

  “We had plans,” I heard myself say. “We made them when Carol was born. There would be three children. Then the war came and we put it off. That was a mistake; we should have had one of the children anyway, but we didn’t. Then when I returned, there weren’t any cars to sell and I hadn’t much income and we put it off. Then last week Esther decided that it was time. I was making pretty good money again. If we were lucky, we would have one child next year and the other two years later. Neatly planned parenthood, the way the books tell you to do it. We wanted our second child to be a boy. The sex of the third wouldn’t matter. In fact, if they were all girls I wouldn’t care. Three girls like Carol . . .”

  Abruptly I tore myself away from Molly and crossed to the farther wall and stood there breathing hard. I heard her follow me. Her hands slid up under my armpits. I stood rigid, unyielding.

  “Adam, it’s all right. You can hold me and tell me about your wife.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I love Esther.”

  “She’s in the world outside, we’ve nothing left but each other. Hold me.”

  I wanted to and I did. In my arms she was firm and soft and strong and weak. Presently we sat on the floor. The air was better down there — comparatively better.

  “You haven’t asked me about myself,” she said with her mouth on the side of my jaw.

  “Do you want me to?”

  She took a long time replying. “There’s nobody who’ll miss me — not even my father, I think. That’s even worse than having people who’ll be hurt when you’re gone.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “I’m a girl who made the mistake of not meeting a decent boy like you years ago. That’s all there is.”

  We were quiet then. Perhaps she dozed off. She was so still against me that she could have been asleep or, like me, staring into the darkness.

  When the trap door opened, it was night in the outer world. A flashlight beam knifed down and crawled over the floor until it found us. The unaccustomed light hurt my eyes. I did not look up or even shift my position. All I could see of Molly was her hair in my face.

  “Ready to talk?” Rufus said.

  Crooked Nose, I thought. By. the process of elimination, he was the only one who could have taken the bag. I had mentioned him this morning, but Tilly had insisted that I was trying to make a red herring out of somebody I’d happened to see eat in the lunchroom a couple of times. Bringing up his name again would be as useless as asking for water. My parched throat was too tired for unnecessary speech.

  “He’ll talk plenty when he gets thirstier,” Rufus said.

  Tilly was up there with him. I heard her snort. “What’s the sense waiting? Maybe it’ll take days before he breaks. For all we know, he told somebody he was coming here. My way will get it out of him right away.”

  “It’s too early,” Rufus said doubtfully.

  “We can wait three hours. That’ll be just about midnight.”

  The light leaped out of the hole and the trap door banged shut. I felt the tightening pressure of Molly’s embrace.

  The brilliance of the midnight moon swept the stars from the sky. Greedily our lungs drew in crisp September air. It was a good night for living and loving. No night was good for dying.

  Tilly and Ed Weaver led the procession up the hill behind the barn. Molly and I followed, flanked by Rufus and Beezie. Milton and his rifle brought up the rear. Our wrists were tied behind our backs. They were taking no chance that Molly would run for it as Larry had last night, or that I would put up a fight in spite of their guns. They did not want to kill either of us except in a special way.

  “See that hump up there?” Rufus said when we were half way .up the hill. “That’s our private reservoir for the house and lot. We pump the water up into it from a gravel well near the barn and gravity brings it down again. Milton says the tank is half-full now. It’ll take maybe three hours of pumping before the water’s over your nose. Less for the girl.”

  Behind us Milton gave the dry snicker of an evil old man.

  Molly stumbled. Rufus, whose hand was on her elbow, yanked her upright. Everybody paused. She stood trembling, waiting for strength to return to her legs.

  Tilly impaled us with her flashlight. “Why don’t you two get smart?” She wheezed from the climb. “We’re not anxious to pollute our water supply.”

  I said without hope of getting anywhere; “You’re the one who’s stupid. Can’t you see that I wouldn’t have held out this long if I had it?”

  “But you know where it is.”

  “I don’t.”

  Viciously her flashlight arched upward and went out. We resumed the ascent by moonlight.

  The reservoir was another hole in the ground, smaller than the one out of -which we had just come, with another trap door. Only a couple of feet of the concrete walls were visible above the wild grass. Milton fished a key out of his denim overalls, mounted the flat wooden roof of the reservoir and unlocked the trap door.

  “The girl first,” Tilly said.

  Rufus tugged
her toward the reservoir. Milton came down from the roof and took her other arm. She did not hold back, or whimper, or beg for mercy. There seemed to be ho bones in her face, but her step was firm and her carriage erect.

  She could die well. She could do everything well.

  Beezie and Ed Weaver were holding me. I felt myself buck against their grips; I heard myself make animal noises in my throat. They braced themselves, clinging to me, Rufus and Milton stopped as they' were about to push Molly up on the roof and looked back. With my arms free, I might have broken a jaw or two, but my futile thrashing was only a demonstration of fear. I forced myself to subside, and I spun my head to Tilly.

  “Why her?” I cried in a voice that wasn’t mine. “She doesn’t know anything. She can’t tell you anything.”

  Tilly was as solid and low and unshakable as the boulders planted on the hillside. “She came with you. If she doesn’t know, it’s up to you to save her and yourself. But I think you both know.”

  A thin exclamation cut the night. There was a splash and then silence.

  When I turned my head back to the reservoir, Milton and Rufus were alone on the roof. They peered down through the trap door! “She’s come up,” Milton announced. “Say, Tilly, they’ll last longer if we untie their hands.”

  “They’ll last long enough.”

  Beezie and Ed Weaver yanked at my arms. Rufus and Milton reached down. I was pushed and pulled to the roof. Somebody leaped away from in front of me, somebody shoved hard against my back, and suddenly there was nothing under my feet. Momentarily I was checked by my shoulder smacking the side of the trap door, then the water came at me. I fell sideways into its outrageous coldness. Automatically I kicked out. One foot scraped against a wall; my head bobbed up by itself. My knees found support on the concrete floor, and I felt air on my face.

  I remained kneeling in the reservoir with my chin barely out of the water. My tongue, remembering its thirst, licked wet lips. I lowered my head and drank.